6 ms·

solar/wind + batteries is now cheaper than coal and nuclear. And it can be brought online faster with virtually no safety issues. Nuclear had it's day and it's

solar/wind + batteries is now cheaper than coal and nuclear. And it can be brought online faster with virtually no safety issues. Nuclear had it's day and it's over. At this point subsidizing it is just creating a mess so that we can give money to GE et al for providing something that--thanks to technology--has no value. If you really want to, just give GE the money directly so that we won't have to bother decommissioning some disaster decades from now.

lightgreen 6y ago
Do you have evidence that batteries are cheaper than say nuclear? I only heard of the opposite, batteries are prohibitively expensive.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Batteries are only the most of expensive of many candidates for energy storage. But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate.
  - glogla 6y ago
    Australia has a tiny (on grid scale) battery used to stabilize the grid, not for long term storage like you would need for relying on solar energy in place that actually has winters.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    > Batteries are only the most of expensive of many candidates for energy storage. Maybe. But nuclear does not require batteries. > But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate. I do don’t have the numbers from Australia at hand. Do you? Is it really cheaper than nuclear, or they heavily overpaid for them, or Telsa sold it with large discount?
  - nickik 6y ago
    I love that Australia battery, but lets be real its tiny. Comparing that to a solution that could fully balance all solar/wind energy is a gigantic strech. I have looked into all of these storage mechanism, and not one is actually really read for the market and is mass deployable quickly. We just have to hope Tesla can actually spit out many tera of batteries by 2030 and the other companies match them.
  - coffexx 6y ago
    But only adequate for a very narrow use-case so far, _not_ as a daily driver. Here in South Australia where I live the Hornsdale installation (the Tesla one) is capable of storing 150MW. Its purpose is not to drive the entire grid every day, but to help deal with minor fluctuations in supply and demand, and mitigate brown/blackouts during emergencies. In-between those times it stores electricity while prices are cheap, and sells when the prices are high to turn a profit The overwhelming source of electricity across Australia is supplied by fossil fuels (despite our abundance of clean nuclear fuel). The entire reason the installation was built in the first place was because of a series of brownouts and blackouts caused by interruptions in the supply of electricity from interstate one day (we don't generate enough by ourselves sadly). It caused a fairly large political situation to develop, and resulted in the construction of the Hornsdale installation. Contractually Hornsdale is obliged to be able to supply 70MW for 10 minutes, or 30MW for 3 hours on demand during emergencies. For some perspective, the current load on the grid as at the time I started writing this is 2150MW(6pm local time). Australian battery installations are simply not operating at the scale you want them to be here. Hornsdale has a niche it is filling quite admirably, but be careful when you use it as an example of grid-scale viability. It's simply not.
  - Matumio 6y ago
    One potential alternative to batteries might be to build a couple of towers lifting concrete blocks up and down: https://energyvault.com/#operating-parameters https://energyvault.com/#operating-parameters
    - ralphhughes 6y ago
      I'd heard of this as a theory many times before, I didn't know someone had actually built one! Good site too, thanks for the link.
    - dimnsionofsound 6y ago
      I’m not sure this idea is all that they’re marketing it as. Here’s a video discussing the drawbacks [0], the guy doing the video can be kind of abrasive at times but worth watching/skimming as a counterpoint. [0]: https://youtu.be/NIhCuzxNvv0 https://youtu.be/NIhCuzxNvv0
    - loufe 6y ago
      My research into this a little while ago showed that this has a very poor energy density to capital cost. There are some other techs like molten salt which are supposed to be better.
- epistasis 6y ago
  Until recently, batteries have been very expensive. However, like wind and solar, as we build the industry they are dropping exponentially in cost, at about 20% per year over the past decade [1], and we are hitting a non-linear inflection point when it's more profitable to include batteries in a new build than to omit them. One set of estimated from Lazard: advanced nuclear at $118-$192/MWh, and lithium-ion charged from directly attached solar at $102-$139/MWh [2]. Lazard have analyses for energy generation costs by technology, and storage costs based on use case and scenario. (Note that the storage use cases include the cost of charging the storage system.) These cost estimates work hard to simplify a hugely complex subject, by estimating a levelized cost of energy, which is then of course an oversimplification. It doesn't consider the value of when energy is delivered, or the price of when the storage is charged. EIA, filled with a lot of hard energy guys that are dismayed to see renewables outperforming in cost, puts out ridiculous numbers, but has also embraced something called the LACE to try to compensate. However they have been so wrong on hard numbers that they can't be trusted when it comes to renewables. The design of energy markets has absolutely huge impacts on the profitability of storage as well, and it can still be very hard to get compensated for the value provided to the grid. There probably would already have been GW of batteries on Texas' ERCOT grid if they buy/sell dual nature had been legal earlier. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/the-story-of-cheaper-batteries-from-smartphones-to-teslas/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/the-story-of-che... [2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/
faeyanpiraat 6y ago
I would assume wind and solar having unknown undesirable secondary effects. A nuclear power plant is fairly self-contained. A giant black solar installation captures a lot of heat that would’ve been reflected back into space. Wind farms slow down wind (obviously..) We all know how important the gyres in the oceans to preserving the current ecosystem. Everything is in a delicate balance, if we start messing up something new who knows what would happen. Are there any studies in this area?
- FooHentai 6y ago
  >A giant black solar installation captures a lot of heat that would’ve been reflected back into space. Nuclear plants take energy sequestered in matter and unleashes it to a form that ultimately will decay to heat just the same. This outcome is the same regardless of the power source. If climate change is a relevant concern to the discussion then alongside discussing of sustainable energy there's an equal topic of how we re-sequester or eject the additional energy we've so far pumped into the atmosphere in the form of energy decaying to heat. Not to mention how to curb our energy demands so that we don't continue to worsen the situation. >Wind farms slow down wind (obviously..) Yeah quite a lot on the scale of large farms, slowing wind speeds by up to 50%. The optimist in me thinks this could be a beneficial thing given our atmosphere is generally expected to become more chaotic with stronger winds as a result of climate change, but the realist in me thinks it's largely irrelevant since turbines can't operate during the extremes, which are expected to become more commonplace. >Are there any studies in this area? Not sure, but it's an interesting question.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    And nuclear plants release 2 units of waste heat energy for every 1 unit of electrical energy they produce. A solar field, if its efficiency > the albedo of the ground on which it was built, causes net local cooling. In both cases the produced power is eventually degraded to heat (in the grid and at the consumer), but the overall burden for direct global thermal pollution is lower for solar than for nuclear. Note, of course, that direct thermal pollution is greatly overshadowed right now by forcing from increasing greenhouse gases.

lightgreen 6y ago

Do you have evidence that batteries are cheaper than say nuclear? I only heard of the opposite, batteries are prohibitively expensive.

ncmncm 6y ago
Batteries are only the most of expensive of many candidates for energy storage. But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate.
- glogla 6y ago
  Australia has a tiny (on grid scale) battery used to stabilize the grid, not for long term storage like you would need for relying on solar energy in place that actually has winters.
- lightgreen 6y ago
  > Batteries are only the most of expensive of many candidates for energy storage. Maybe. But nuclear does not require batteries. > But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate. I do don’t have the numbers from Australia at hand. Do you? Is it really cheaper than nuclear, or they heavily overpaid for them, or Telsa sold it with large discount?
- nickik 6y ago
  I love that Australia battery, but lets be real its tiny. Comparing that to a solution that could fully balance all solar/wind energy is a gigantic strech. I have looked into all of these storage mechanism, and not one is actually really read for the market and is mass deployable quickly. We just have to hope Tesla can actually spit out many tera of batteries by 2030 and the other companies match them.
- coffexx 6y ago
  But only adequate for a very narrow use-case so far, _not_ as a daily driver. Here in South Australia where I live the Hornsdale installation (the Tesla one) is capable of storing 150MW. Its purpose is not to drive the entire grid every day, but to help deal with minor fluctuations in supply and demand, and mitigate brown/blackouts during emergencies. In-between those times it stores electricity while prices are cheap, and sells when the prices are high to turn a profit The overwhelming source of electricity across Australia is supplied by fossil fuels (despite our abundance of clean nuclear fuel). The entire reason the installation was built in the first place was because of a series of brownouts and blackouts caused by interruptions in the supply of electricity from interstate one day (we don't generate enough by ourselves sadly). It caused a fairly large political situation to develop, and resulted in the construction of the Hornsdale installation. Contractually Hornsdale is obliged to be able to supply 70MW for 10 minutes, or 30MW for 3 hours on demand during emergencies. For some perspective, the current load on the grid as at the time I started writing this is 2150MW(6pm local time). Australian battery installations are simply not operating at the scale you want them to be here. Hornsdale has a niche it is filling quite admirably, but be careful when you use it as an example of grid-scale viability. It's simply not.
- Matumio 6y ago
  One potential alternative to batteries might be to build a couple of towers lifting concrete blocks up and down: https://energyvault.com/#operating-parameters https://energyvault.com/#operating-parameters
  - ralphhughes 6y ago
    I'd heard of this as a theory many times before, I didn't know someone had actually built one! Good site too, thanks for the link.
  - dimnsionofsound 6y ago
    I’m not sure this idea is all that they’re marketing it as. Here’s a video discussing the drawbacks [0], the guy doing the video can be kind of abrasive at times but worth watching/skimming as a counterpoint. [0]: https://youtu.be/NIhCuzxNvv0 https://youtu.be/NIhCuzxNvv0
  - loufe 6y ago
    My research into this a little while ago showed that this has a very poor energy density to capital cost. There are some other techs like molten salt which are supposed to be better.
epistasis 6y ago
Until recently, batteries have been very expensive. However, like wind and solar, as we build the industry they are dropping exponentially in cost, at about 20% per year over the past decade [1], and we are hitting a non-linear inflection point when it's more profitable to include batteries in a new build than to omit them. One set of estimated from Lazard: advanced nuclear at $118-$192/MWh, and lithium-ion charged from directly attached solar at $102-$139/MWh [2]. Lazard have analyses for energy generation costs by technology, and storage costs based on use case and scenario. (Note that the storage use cases include the cost of charging the storage system.) These cost estimates work hard to simplify a hugely complex subject, by estimating a levelized cost of energy, which is then of course an oversimplification. It doesn't consider the value of when energy is delivered, or the price of when the storage is charged. EIA, filled with a lot of hard energy guys that are dismayed to see renewables outperforming in cost, puts out ridiculous numbers, but has also embraced something called the LACE to try to compensate. However they have been so wrong on hard numbers that they can't be trusted when it comes to renewables. The design of energy markets has absolutely huge impacts on the profitability of storage as well, and it can still be very hard to get compensated for the value provided to the grid. There probably would already have been GW of batteries on Texas' ERCOT grid if they buy/sell dual nature had been legal earlier. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/the-story-of-cheaper-batteries-from-smartphones-to-teslas/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/the-story-of-che... [2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/

faeyanpiraat 6y ago

I would assume wind and solar having unknown undesirable secondary effects. A nuclear power plant is fairly self-contained. A giant black solar installation captures a lot of heat that would’ve been reflected back into space. Wind farms slow down wind (obviously..) We all know how important the gyres in the oceans to preserving the current ecosystem. Everything is in a delicate balance, if we start messing up something new who knows what would happen. Are there any studies in this area?

FooHentai 6y ago
>A giant black solar installation captures a lot of heat that would’ve been reflected back into space. Nuclear plants take energy sequestered in matter and unleashes it to a form that ultimately will decay to heat just the same. This outcome is the same regardless of the power source. If climate change is a relevant concern to the discussion then alongside discussing of sustainable energy there's an equal topic of how we re-sequester or eject the additional energy we've so far pumped into the atmosphere in the form of energy decaying to heat. Not to mention how to curb our energy demands so that we don't continue to worsen the situation. >Wind farms slow down wind (obviously..) Yeah quite a lot on the scale of large farms, slowing wind speeds by up to 50%. The optimist in me thinks this could be a beneficial thing given our atmosphere is generally expected to become more chaotic with stronger winds as a result of climate change, but the realist in me thinks it's largely irrelevant since turbines can't operate during the extremes, which are expected to become more commonplace. >Are there any studies in this area? Not sure, but it's an interesting question.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  And nuclear plants release 2 units of waste heat energy for every 1 unit of electrical energy they produce. A solar field, if its efficiency > the albedo of the ground on which it was built, causes net local cooling. In both cases the produced power is eventually degraded to heat (in the grid and at the consumer), but the overall burden for direct global thermal pollution is lower for solar than for nuclear. Note, of course, that direct thermal pollution is greatly overshadowed right now by forcing from increasing greenhouse gases.